Action Plan Mapping - Practical Actions From Training

Putting plans in place to evaluate your training success

What is it?

Action Plan Mapping (APM) is a web based system of following up, embedding and evaluating training. It has been created by Zach Zenger, the founding father of management training in the USA, as the ultimate way of meeting the challenging question “How do you/we follow up your training to make sure it is working?”

The benefits to you:

Training is followed up more easily as both learners and their mentors are regularly reminded to review and discuss progress

Learners are put under (very reasonable) pressure to implement their action points and justify the investment in training

You are able to evaluate the effectiveness of the training in terms of results/outputs. Kirkpatrick Levels 3 and 4 are possible

How does it work?

At the end of the training session each learner commits to objectives and action points in their own private area on the APM website

Each action point has its own record in their private area. Typically there would be 5 objectives

The website sends the learner regular reminders to update their record about their progress, achievements and challenges in implementing each of their action points. This could be every week, fortnightly or every month as selected

The learners update each record and thereby chart their achievements progressively

Their ‘mentor’ (trainer or line manager) has access to their records and so can see and evaluate their progress

They are allowed to have some ‘private’ objectives which no one can see if they choose

‘Mentor’ and ‘mentee’ discuss progress (or lack of it) regularly and through this they evaluate results of the training and embed the learning